Earlier this week I delivered my initial benchmarks of the new AMDGPU Linux driver stack for supporting the AMD Radeon R9 285 "TONGA" and all new/future GPUs like Carrizo and Fiji. The new AMDGPU kernel driver is present in the upcoming Linux 4.2 kernel while on the user-space side there's separate code branches required for libdrm and Mesa. Fortunately, it looks like that work will be merged soon.

Since the Linux 4.0 kernel there has been DisplayPort audio support for the open-source Radeon driver. That DP audio handling came after a big rework to the audio code in the Radeon DRM kernel driver. A half-year later it looks like all the audio code is now cleaned up and ready.

The news today of OpenGL 4 finally being accomplished in Mesa/Gallium3D is quite ironic and memorable as this day five years ago was when the R600 Gallium3D driver reached the milestone of being able to run glxgears on AMD hardware.

In the middle of the night I got an auto-notification... The Radeon R9 Fury is finally in-stock! Few minutes later, this Fiji HBM graphics card was ordered for some Linux testing. We'll have out the first major AMD Fury graphics card tests under Linux in the next few days.

I'm in the midst of a new large open-source and (separately) closed-source NVIDIA/AMD Linux graphics card comparison on the latest drivers as part of an upcoming Radeon R7 370 Linux review and to be followed by R9 Fury Linux benchmarks. However, for those interested in the Catalyst 15.7 benchmarks on Linux, I ran some quick tests with a Radeon R9 285 and R9 290.

Alex Deucher sent out twelve new patches just minutes ago for the AMDGPU DRM driver. The AMDGPU driver was merged for Linux 4.2 while these patches provide new features/functionality and thus will not be merged until Linux 4.3.

I'm in the process of running open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D tests on the new MSI Radeon R7 370 4G graphics card. That initial Linux review of the AMD Radeon R7 370 with the open-source driver will be published later this week (still waiting on an updated Catalyst driver for those proprietary driver tests). However, as an excerpt of the Gallium3D testing, here are results from some AMD graphics cards with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Team Fortress 2.

It's expected that today AMD will be releasing an updated Catalyst (v15.20) Linux graphics driver. Aside from Radeon Rx 300/Fury graphics card support, what do you hope is part of this new driver series?

AMD yesterday issued a warning over their second quarter guidance that they expect them to come in below expectations. Things aren't looking good with their stock price being down by another 16% so far this morning.

For those that follow me on Twitter know I've started testing the MSI Radeon R7 370 4G graphics card as one of the new models launched by AMD last month. For this new (non-Fiji) graphics card, using the open-source graphics driver is the only choice on Linux right now.

One week after the Radeon R9 Fury X launched at $649 USD with an integrated water-cooling solution, the graphics card remains in short supply and it's not clear when exactly this graphics card will better saturate retail channels. At this point, I've shifted my focused to the air-cooled AMD Radeon R9 Fury graphics card that will ship in two weeks and be air-cooled while costing $100 less.

This week AMD launched the Radeon R9 Fury X at $649 for this "Fiji" GPU with High Bandwidth Memory that's liquid cooled. The Fury X is AMD's strongest competition to NVIDIA in years, but sadly this high-end graphics card appears to be in very short supply.

AMD's new 64-bit ARM Opteron quad-core development board coming out later this year at an "affordable" price has us quite excited since it was announced earlier this week at the Red Hat Summit. ARM has now revealed the first pictures of this board.

Some AMD news this week that got me even more excited than the Radeon R9 Fury X launch is word that they are developing a low-cost ARM development board for release later this year. This affordable development board will feature a quad-core AMD Opteron A1100 Series processor.

After being announced earlier this month and the Radeon Rx 300 series launching last week, the $649+ R9 Fury X water-cooled graphics card launches today. With the launch comes a whole bunch of (Windows) reviews too.

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